It doesn’t matter if you are the average Joe Blow or a huge corporation like Burger King, everyone is being targeted these days.

Cyber criminals are searching for everything from your banking and financial info to your email, Facebook and and other social networking passwords. Luckily there are technologies and a few simple practices that can help you stay safer online, as well as offline.

Here are 5 Mandatory Steps that you should follow for protecting data from hacking and eavesdroppers….

1. IMPORTANT: Use Strong Encryption To Protect Your Files

Encryption is the process of encoding a message, or any other data, in such a way that eavesdroppers or hackers cannot read it, but authorized parties can. Today there are many options that provide both software and hardware encryption solutions for protecting your data.